The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(16)

“Yeah, yeah, understood. So you’re going to do it?”

She finally abandoned a spare inch of pretense, rolling her eyes. “Of course. Assuming Ezra’s fine with it.”

“Jesus. You can’t be serious.”

Every now and then, Libby achieved a look that successfully withered his balls, and this was one of those instances. It was the kind of look that reminded him she’d set him on fire the first time she’d met him without even batting an eye.

He’d like her more if she did it more often.

“I live with him, Varona,” Libby reminded him, as if Nico could possibly forget her absurd selection of Ezra Fowler, their former R.A. and human wet blanket. “I think I should probably tell him if I’m planning to jet off to Alexandria for a year. Or even longer, I guess. Assuming I get initiated, that is,” she said, with an air of unsaid and I will be.

They exchanged a look of agreement that required no translation.

“I mean, you are going to talk about it with Max and Gideon, aren’t you?” Libby prompted him, arching a brow that disappeared once again beneath her bangs. “You guys haven’t been apart for longer than an hour since freshman year.”

“You say that like we’re surgically attached. We have our own lives,” Nico reminded her.

Libby’s brow remained annoyingly lost to the span of her forehead.

“We do,” Nico snapped, and her lips twisted up, doubtful. “And anyway, they’re not up to anything. Max is independently wealthy and Gideon—” He broke off. “Well, you know Gideon.” She softened at that. “Yeah. Well, um.”

She toyed with her hair. It occurred to Nico, not for the first time, that he should really start playing Libby Rhodes anxiety-habit bingo.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, pausing as they arrived at her block. “Right?”

“Hm? Yeah.” She was thinking about something. “Right, and—”

“Rhodes,” he sighed, and she looked up, frowning. “Look, just don’t… you know. Don’t get all Rhodes about it.”

“That’s not a thing, Varona,” she grumbled.

“It’s absolutely a thing,” he assured her. “Just don’t Rhodes out on this.”

“What the—”

“You know,” he cut in. “Don’t spend all this time like, fretting or whatever. It’s exhausting.”

She set her jaw. “So I’m exhausting now?”

She really was, and how she didn’t already know it remained an eternal mystery. “You’re good, Rhodes,” he reminded her, leaping to cut her off before she got needlessly defensive. “You’re good, okay? Just accept that I wouldn’t bother hating you if you weren’t.”

“Varona, that presumes I care at all what you think.”

“You care what everyone thinks, Rhodes. Especially me.”

“Oh, especially you, really?”

“Yes.” Clearly. “No point denying it.”

She was agitated now, but at least that was an improvement on weak and insecure. “Look, whatever,” she muttered. “Just… see you. Tomorrow, I guess.” She pivoted away, heading up the block.

“Tell Ezra I say ‘sup,’” he called after her. She flipped him off over her shoulder.

All was well, then, or at least the same as it always was.

Nico managed the handful of blocks on foot before waving himself up the stairs of his building, fiddling with the wards and barging in without a key to find Gideon seated on the cramped sofa beside a dozing, outstretched black lab.

“Nicola’s,” Gideon said, glancing up at his entry with a smile. “Como estas?”

“Ah, bien, más o menos. ?a va?”

“Oui, ?a va,” Gideon replied, giving the dog a nudge. “Max, wake up.”

After a moment’s pause, the dog slid groggily from the sofa, stretching out with a heavy-lidded look of annoyance. Then, in a blink, he was back to his usual form, scratching idly at his buzz cut to glare over his shoulder at Gideon.

“I was comfortable, you massive fuck,” announced the man who was sometimes Maximilian Viridian Wolfe (barely domesticated under the best of circumstances) and sometimes not.

“Well, I wasn’t,” Gideon said in his usual measured tone before setting himself on his feet, tossing aside the newspaper he’d been reading. “Should we go out? Get dinner?”

“Nah, I’ll cook,” Nico said. He was really the only one who could, seeing as Max was mostly uninterested in picking up practical skills, preferring instead to sleep on the couch and ponder his existence, while Gideon… had other problems. Right now Gideon was shirtless, stretching his hands overhead past the usual wayward glints from his sandy hair, and if not for the bruising below his eyes, he would have looked almost perfectly normal.

He wasn’t, of course, but deceptive normalcy was all part of Gideon’s charm.

Eternal sluggishness aside, Nico had certainly seen Gideon in poorer states than this one. Hastily avoiding his mother, for instance, who had a tendency to show up in public toilets or the occasional gutter of rainwater, or skirting his foster family, who were less a family than a bunch of bloodsucking Nova Scotian leeches. Gideon’s condition had been worse than usual in recent weeks, but Nico was pretty sure that was the inevitable result of graduating NYUMA. For four years Gideon had gotten to have a mostly normal life, but now he was back to…